CPaaS Gets More Defined

Back on July 31st I opined about CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service) and why I felt it was important and how it would be coming to the forefront. A few days later Vonage snapped up TokBox, and folded it into Nexmo making CPaaS more relevant and timely to the telecom community.

If you're not familiar with the idea of CPaaS think Twilio, Plivo, Vonage's Nexmo, BIC's owned TeleSign, SignalWire, MessageBird, Intelepeer (I named them that changing it from VoEX), VoIP Innovations, TeleStax and VoxImplant. Those companies are all CPaaS companies along with others. Many are built in full or in part upon open source technology from FreeSWITCH (now owned by client SignalWire)-and that list includes, for starters, the best known ones like Nexmo, Plivo, Twilio, all of which provide pieces and parts to create voice, text and video functionality as discreet parts of the application stack.

Recently, when I was hosting some analyst briefings for clients, it was always interesting to hear the misunderstanding about CPaaS vs. UCaaS. The latter is a full service offering from modern day telecom companies. Think 8x8, RingCentral, Vonage, Dialpad, Telzio- where the services are delivered from the cloud (not hosted and not on prem PBX-those of UC and very different). 

CPaaS is to developers like being an auto mechanic and going to NAPA Auto Parts or ordering parts from the car manufacturer's parts warehouse, or an aftermarket manufacturer to add or replace something that involves communications that usually the telecom company doesn't offer or can't provide that works "your way."

Today, Tsahi, who never misses an opportunity to enlighten us about what he's working on, has a fairly nice introduction about how visual design tools are impacting CPaaS. It's a nice overview, and likely includes some of his clients or sponsors of reports. What I liked about the recap was the very cool chart that shows who offers what and if the companies charge or not.

Give Tsahi a read....it's always great to see another VoIP Pioneer still helping the industry know what's going on.

Comments

[Tsahi Levent-Levi]

Andy,

Thanks for the kind words. Just to be clear -

None of these vendors are a direct customer of mine at the moment for any specific project. I've written about it just because it was interesting and because CPaaS and its trends in general are important to me (as a consultant, I better know more about it that most others).

It is also funny - I wanted to write a report about CPaaS with Chad Hart. We sniffed around, found out everyone things it is needed, but no one will be willing to purchase it. So we wrote a report about AI in RTC instead :-)